good delivery? - a postmortem

Hello! I've never written a postmortem before and don't really know what I'm doing so let's just get right into it:

Introduction

bad delivery taught me a lot about the game development process in general. Mainly that any estimates of how long it'll take me to finish something will be way off. When I first saw the strict asset limitations for O2A2 I thought, "I could finish this game in a day, tops!" It ended up taking me about a week to finish, but I'm fairly happy with the final product so I don't think that time was wasted or anything. With that said, the plight of creation is you never notice imperfections until after unleashing it into the world...

Now for a brief rundown of how development went and where I think I succeeded and/or failed. 

[This assumes that you've already played the game so minor spoiler warning.]

Art + GUI

The art-making process was pretty straightforward. I just put together my references and got to work. All the art assets I made followed the same basic steps of sketch > colors > detailing + post-processing. 

Of course, that's not to say the process wasn't time-consuming... (I'll definitely remember to keep the sprite expressions on different layers next time.) At some point I seriously considered just sticking with the placeholder art I made for shits and giggles, but I think our local menace here needed all the pretty boy points he could get. 

Graphic design is not my passion, but I decided to make my own GUI at the last minute just to make the game stand out a bit more. I'm happy with how it turned out, however basic, though I do regret not customizing the menu screens a bit more. 

Writing 

The story was first conceptualized during a road trip, and it all started with a punchline. Literally, all I had was "Processed my ass, you just put the money in your pocket!" and I just kept adding jokes until I had a semi-coherent story. Since I couldn't actually work on the game until I got home, I probably spent more time than needed brainstorming. I eventually settled on a comedy VN with vague dating sim elements.

I  wrote the script directly in my text editor (Atom) to save time and just referenced that little memo on my phone with the plot summary and random details. Staying under the 1k word limit was harder than expected (quite a bit of narration and jokes were cut out). Ultimately, I'm glad I went the comedy route because I didn't have to worry about writing something super deep and life-changing; my only goal was to make the player laugh. And I'd say that went pretty well! 

I had 3 endings planned from the get-go, but I did rewrite them a few times to make sure they were plausible enough. I always like to show different sides of the same characters, so the endings (mostly the good end) also served to characterize Manuel beyond 'outlandish pizza guy'. I wanted him to come across as chaotic but charming, so I'm really glad that people seem to like him. 

Programming + Accessibility 

I'm not the best programmer, but I do have a decent amount of experience with Renpy, so I didn't have much trouble coding the game. As usual, the trickiest part was just getting visual effects to look the way I want, particularly the screen shake effects and star rating screen. Long story short, I used my fair share of creative workarounds and not-so-elegant solutions... but at least everything works (which is basically my motto when it comes to programming).

I definitely had to get the most creative while implementing the accessibility features. Luckily, Renpy's built-in self-voicing feature and the menus from the All-In-One GUI Template saved a lot of time, but I still ran into a few hiccups due to pure inexperience. Like how exactly do I describe the things happening onscreen such as camera movements or transitions? I have no idea what the standard is for alt text in video games, so I just tried to make the descriptions as objective as possible without breaking the flow of the script. Here's the code I used to display the image captions if anyone's curious:

I'm sure there are things I could've done better when it comes to accessibility, but I like to think I ensured that anyone and everyone can enjoy bad delivery. 

Conclusion + What's Next

If you're reading this, thank you! One, for checking out my game, and two, for caring enough to listen to me ramble about it for many paragraphs. I was blown away by the positive reception my silly little game got, and I truly appreciate every single interaction from the bottom of my heart. 

Working on bad delivery truly reignited my passion for game development, so I can assure you it won't be the last project of mine to see the light of day. I've actually been working on a much larger VN for quite some time now, so (fingers crossed) I'll be able to start showing that off in the coming months. 

Once again, thank you for joining me, and until next time! 👋